Question: Lucid Dreaming

Question: “Dear V, Why do I have lucid dreams so often? When I know how to lucid dream, I have easy access to my subconscious mind. I can communicate directly with it to gain deeper insights about myself and how I perceive the world…definitely something worth trying when I’m awake in dreams. ”

Ask V: Thank you for the questions dear P. Lucid dreams happen for sure and some people have a greater tendency to experience them.

In my experience however, lucid dreams have to do with intense emotions, often with emotions that are not manifest in the life of the dreamer . Very vivid images in dreams speak of a concentrated psychic energy that is looking to express itself. So perhaps these types of dreams show that a new development of the personality is about to take place. I have seen quite frequently that this process becomes clear only with the passing of several years. What is also fascinating is that this intensity in dreams sometimes is related to symptoms like a chronic ailments or deep suffering.

When You have such dreams, they may signal that major changes in adaptation to reality, or a change in health could be possible. But this in any case requires that the dreamer engages in serious inner work. Anything that you see as clear in a dream tends to mislead. The capacity of the unconscious to create images vastly exceeds our narrow conscious attention span.

Dream images always challenge our understanding

There is a popular belief today that lucid dreaming is ‘lucid’, as if a dream could be easier to grasp or understand because the recall of the details is better. Dream images as a rule are however not easy to understand, especially for the dreamer. The material helps in that there is more of it to work with, but the challenge to understand is not diminished.

I should say here that I have no experience whatever with eastern, primitive and other major cultures, other than references I have read. From such references I gather that the naturalness with which different Peoples relate to the unconscious is dramatically different. But it tells me also that in general we do not have common definitions of what is consciousness or the unconscious.

INNERwork – my approach – considers the central importance of how You relate to your own experience of the psyche, your body and your own reality. Because it is purely based on experience, it does not rely on any particular religious, philosophical or metaphysical idea. And quite surely for You it will be different depending on your own cultural and beliefs background.

Descent of the soul

Independently of this background, whatever the images in dreams, these are natural products of the psyche, which always have some form of compensatory or developmental characteristic relative to Your conscious mind. This inevitably means that they are not within the conscious grasp of Your consciousness as the dreamer at the time of the dream.

The dream image always represents a challenge – whether you deal with it by some tribal or ancient ritual, or you attempt to make conscious its contents. What is right for each person, depends solely on the person.

It is a difficult task even for an experienced analyst or coach to understand the personal psyche of a dreamer. You see, the unconscious is by any experience vast and unexplored. So we have little bearings to move around in it, and we are all immersed in it. I am of course referring not to the personal unconscious, but rather to the larger space of collective human memories where time and space do not exist.

Organising of the mind

The general trend or pattern I see is that everyone finds very difficult, to understand consciously their dreams health, body, emotions and the meaning of personal life. It is usually a great frustration, failure, pain, crises, chronic deterioration of health, etc. what triggers bouts of self-knowledge seeking. And it is also at times like this, or announcing such times, when lucid and vivid dreams tend to happen.

In my experience, it may take many years before one can actually say ah-ha, that is what the dream was trying to say. I have had dreams which 10 years later have only become clear, and others which I have not understood to this day. Especially those dreams that were more lucid and powerful, with greater recall, with greater emotional intensity stand out as difficult.